Sled rolls out Cost Per Second buying on Parsec media platform

Mobile advertising company, Sled, has just launched media buying on a Cost Per Second (CPS) basis in partnership with Proof Advertising. Effectively, CPS only charges clients for the time consumers actually spend with an ad. The new time-based model comes as Sled and Proof have been designing a campaign for San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau, delivered on Sled’s Parsec media platform.

“Buying media on a cost per second basis using Parsec is attractive because there’s less waste and we know what we’re getting. The media business is about capturing attention and Parsec helps us do that more efficiently with their time-based model.”

Performance for the San Antonio campaign exceeded early benchmarks as individuals spent 4.8 seconds with the ads on average and 17% delivered over 7 seconds in interaction.

The Parsec media platform allows marketers to create high impact mobile ads and combines Sled’s rich media format with its time-based media platform. Sled rich media utilises scrolling gestures and other interactive features on video, carousel and map ad formats. Ads are politely interruptive and can be controlled by the user. With the help of Moat analytics, Sled is able to measure the time of interaction before consumers decide to return to the original content they were viewing.

“Direct response advertisers often use the click as a proxy for success, but brand advertisers have never really had a true real-time success metric to call their own, and finding the right metric for brands has historically proven to be a hard problem to solve. We are making real progress though. CPS could have an explosive impact on brand advertising, with the potential for scale at the same magnitude of what CPC buying did for direct response in the early 2000s.”

With time-based advertising gaining popularity, there’s no doubt that CPS is a good alternative to CPM or impressions. With CPM, an advertiser pays each time an ad is loaded on screen. The problem with this is that all ads are valued the same, no matter how long they were viewed for or the interaction they generated. With time-based advertising, user interruption can be measured, giving a more accurate picture of a campaign’s impact.

“There’s no question that time is a better proxy for attention than impressions. Our research has shown that the amount of time that a consumer chooses to spend with an advertisement is an accurate measure of branding ROI from media spend.”

Sled argues that time-based marketing also has a knock-on effect, whereby ad publishers and tech providers deliver the attention that a brand requires to get their message across, since advertisers are only paying for the actual time a consumer spends with their campaign.

Ly Tran adds:

“As a general rule – as more specificity is used to buy media, quality increases. This was historically the case as direct response advertisers shifted from CPM to CPC and acquisition based pricing, and more recently with audience based targeting and viewability standards in branding. That’s where the power of time-based advertising lies – by increasing specificity of media buys, time-based advertising allows us to ensure that our clients are getting the quality they demand.”